Abstract Together with the many latest efforts to validate the medical benefits of Intercessory Prayer, Prayer for healing continues to be common in the United States today. A 1996 Gallup poll revealed that NINE OUT OF TEN Americans pray and 75% report praying daily. Prayer for healing is pervasive in our American culture from religiously associated hospitals, to church prayer groups/chains, to television evangelists claiming to heal through prayer, to internet prayer chat groups. Throughout time, the power of prayer has been questioned by science.
The analytical mind of the scientist calls for proof of the existence of a higher being. These scientists, both the faithful and nonbelievers alike, have produced studies into the affects of prayer on our physical as well as spiritual well being. This paper attempts to present objectively, up to date data on the efficacy of the application of Intercessory prayer in medicine. Although most of us, who hold the conviction that prayer can and does work, do not call for physical, quantitative evidence of the supremacy of prayer, it is fascinating to examine the results of these studies.
Review of Related Literature Ever since 2000, at least 10 studies of intercessory prayer have been carried out by researchers at institutions comprising the Mind/Body Medical Institute, a nonprofit clinic near Boston run by a Harvard-trained cardiologist, as well as Duke University and the University of Washington. Government backing by financing of intercessory prayer study began in the mid-1990’s and has continued to the present Bush administration (Abott, 2001).
In one continuing study, financed by the National Institutes of Health and called “Placebo Effect in Distant Healing of Wounds,” doctors at California Pacific Medical Center, a major hospital in San Francisco, inflict a tiny stab wound on the abdomens of women receiving breast reconstruction surgery, with their consent, and then determine whether the “focused intention” of a variety of healers speeds the wound’s healing. Two large trials of the effects of prayer on coronary health are currently under review at prominent medical journals (Dossey, 1989).
In 1965, Joyce and Welldon performed the first randomized, controlled, double –blind trial of intercessory prayer. The study incorporated 48 patients with psychological or rheumatoid diseases. They discovered that the group that was prayed for (5 out of 16 became better) and the group that was not prayed for (1 out of 16 became better) did not have considerably significant different outcomes. Collipp, chairman of the pediatric department at Meadowbrook Hospital in New York, conducted the next randomized, controlled, double –blind trial in 1969. He selected 18 patients with leukemia between the ages of one and 19 years old.
Half of the children were prayed for daily by a protestant prayer group in Washington D. C. for 15 months. The other half were not prayed for by a specific group. The outcome was survival at 15 months. 70% of the patients who were prayed for survived, while only 25% in the not-prayed for group survived. Due to the small numbers in the study, these results are not statistically significant. In other words, the results are likely due to chance. Then, in 1988, Byrd published a famous randomized, controlled, double –blind trial of intercessory prayer conducted on patients in the coronary care unit at San Francisco General Hospital.
He took volunteer patients between August 1982 and May 1983 (393 total patients) and randomly divided them into two groups – a prayed for group and a not prayed for group. Each patient being prayed for had a group of three to seven intercessors praying for them daily. The intercessors were chosen based on being “born again Christians” who were already practicing an active Christian life with daily devotional prayer and active participation at a local church.
The intercessors were all told to pray for rapid recovery, prevention of complications and death, and any other prayers they believed would be beneficial. The hospital staff, doctors, patients and Byrd, did not know which patients were being prayed for in the study. The results showed that there was no difference between the two groups in the length of stay in the hospital, in the mortality rate (death rate), or in the number of medications prescribed upon leaving the hospital.
However, he found that the prayed for group had significantly less congestive heart failure, fewer cardiac arrests, less pneumonia, less use of diuretics and antibiotics, and less need for intubation and mechanical ventilation than the not prayed for group. As another way to measure outcomes, Byrd developed a scoring system that would rate a patient’s hospital course as good intermediate or bad based on adverse events that occurred during the hospital stay. The results showed 85% of the prayer group had a rating of good versus 73% in the not prayed for group.
An intermediate rating was given to 1% of the prayer group and 5% of the no prayer group and a bad rating was given to 14% of the prayer group and 22% of the not prayed for group. Byrd concluded from these results that “intercessory prayer to a Judeo-Christian God has a beneficial therapeutic effect in patients admitted to a coronary care unit” (Byrd, 1988). Because the Byrd study was the only study on intercessory prayer to show clinically significant results, in 1999, a man named Harris from the Mid America Heart Institute, St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, MO attempted to replicate Byrd’s findings.
He hypothesized that patients who were admitted to the coronary care unit, who were unknowingly and remotely prayed for by blinded intercessors, would experience fewer complications and have a shorter hospital stay than patients not receiving such prayer. Nine hundred and ninety patients were included in the study. The patients were unaware that they were involved in a study. (Note, this is a major difference from Byrd’s study in which the patients volunteered for the study. ) The intercessors represented a variety of Christian backgrounds and only had to agree to the statement, “I believe in God.
I believe that He is personal and is concerned with individual lives. I further believe that He is responsive to prayers for healing made on behalf of the sick”. The intercessors prayed individually for a specific patient for 28 days. Outcomes were based on a scoring system that was developed to try and rate how well or how bad the hospital course went. Harris found that the prayed for group had a significantly lower complication score than the not prayed for group (about a 10% difference). He found no difference in length of hospital stay between the two groups.
Harris concludes that, “Remote, intercessory prayer was associated with lower coronary care unit course scores. This result suggests that prayer may be an effective adjunct to standard medical care” (Byrd, 1988). The most recent study on intercessory prayer was conducted by Matthews at the University of Miami School of Medicine, Jackson Memorial Hospital outpatient hemodialysis center (Chalmers, 1995). The objective of the study was to explore the effects of intercessory prayer, positive visualization, and expectancy (a placebo effect) on the health and well-being of critically ill patients.
95 patients with end-stage renal disease who were receiving hemodialysis volunteered for the study. The results showed that patients who expected to receive intercessory prayer reported feeling significantly better than did those who expected to receive positive visualization. There was no difference in the measured medical or psychological variables between the three groups. The authors conclude, “The effects of intercessory prayer and transpersonal positive visualization cannot be distinguished from the effect of expectancy.
Therefore, those two interventions do not appear to be effective treatments”. In theseTwo studies have shown a positive therapeutic effect of intercessory prayer (Byrd and Harris) Data Collection These studies employed usually double blind study to assess the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer. Patients were randomly selected by computer to either receive or not receive intercessory prayer. All participants in the study, including patients, doctors, and the conductor of the study himself remained blind throughout the study.
To guard against biasing the study, the patients were not contacted again after it was decided which group would be prayed for, and which group would not. Another study looked at what happened to anxiety, depression, and self-esteem in 406 patients who received intercessory prayer or no prayer. The prayer was offered for 15 minutes daily for 12 weeks. The researcher reported improvement in all of the subjects but found no differences between the prayer and no-prayer groups (Aviles, 2001).